I agree really like this way of looking at religion as a personal experience,
that we too often confuse "religious experience" with institutional religion.
I think we all have to operate from a point-of-view stemming from deep
held beliefs about our reality. The problem that science has with
religion is its claim of infallability and blind obedience to unverified
claims, yet science is neither infallable nor bereft of true believers,
yet these are human beings in both institutions who fall short of either
their creator or the objective ideal. What we witness in effect is the
great influence the subjective has on us, and how it makes us what we are.
All experience whether scientific or spiritual is ultimately personal.

AD

Hamish Stewart
(scm@next.com.au.) wrote:
: I take a pretty strong objection to this idea of how science can be
: verifyied and religion cannot. Your description of the "religious"
: method of enquiry sounds suspiciously like an awful lot of supposedly
: scientific thought and method. I reckon that modern science and religion
: are drawing closer - and its becoming clear that one cannot verify
: everything - if indeed anything. A lot of religion for me is about
: people seeking to describe their experience of living in an amazing
: universe in a personal way - after all we all are seeking to discover
: our indentiy within this vast cosmos - and I think its important to
: bring an aspect of magic to this process. At its highest this is the key
: to religion for me - seeing the magic in the world and using magical
: language to describe the experience of living. Its a lot more satisfying
: to describe something as a living breathing indenity that to break it
: down into its component parts. Frankly scientific thought and the
: obessessin with verification is largely responsible for the level of
: dis-connectedness in our world today - a state of mind that is causing
: pain to many people. May we embrace the magic....